Recently, I introduced myself and my children to the concept of geocaching, as described on geocaching.com.

I knew that a GPS was needed to do this in a meaningful way, because I had researched geocaching a little bit on the internet in the past. The concept appealed to me on a couple of different levels. I had recently acquired an iPhone, and I was interested in trying out its “GPS” capabilities.

In the morning, I asked the kids if they would like to go treasure hunting, for real treasure (sort-of). I explained that there were people who left boxes of stuff hidden in different places, and that we had a way to find them. I told the kids that they would likely find little toys in some of the boxes, and that they could take some items from the box, and leave something of their own in the box to be interesting to other people. My goal was to prevent yet another day of brainless TV watching.

My eight year old son was on board right away. He was very interested in the idea of “hidden treasures”, and he quickly collected a small pile of his toys to give back. My ten year old daughter wasn’t very interested. She had some TV shows that she wanted to watch, and pilfering little trinkets from hidden boxes didn’t sound all that interesting to her. My fifteen year old daughter wanted to go along for something unusual to do. In the end, the ten year old girl, not wanting to get left out of anything, went along, after also assembling a small pile of her own toys to give away.

The difference in the approaches for my young son and his slightly older sister was interesting. The girl wanted to leave several trinkets that she didn’t value in the box in exchange for something she wanted, based on the idea that several small, almost worthless things should add up to something good when you considered them all together. She is dimly aware of the fact that this idea doesn’t really pass muster, but she is also dimly aware of the fact that, while the idea might be sold to other people, the equation balances in her favor. My son, on the other hand, would be the type that would trade a $20 item for a 50 cent item on a whim, and enjoy the idea that the other person would get something exciting as their part of the exchange. I need to somehow mix these two kids together and move each of them toward the other’s point of view.

We took a shovel, a small toolbox full of tools, my iPhone, and water bottles. (In retrospect, we should also have gone and bought a GPS receiver, cheap canvas carrying bags for the kids, and taken printouts of some of the more interesting geocache sites from our home computer.)

I fumbled around with finding candidate geocache sites on my iPhone. This process worked acceptably, but it did not work as well as doing the same thing from my desktop computer at home. I had to do a fair amount of writing down GPS coordinates on paper, and transferring them back into mapping software to pinpoint locations. This was fairly tedious. I had an application called Geopher Light on the iPhone, but in my opinion, it did not help much. It is a very cheap app. I think it was $2. But it needs a lot of work to make it facilitate the geocache hunting process in a smoother way. I can picture the things a geocaching app should do, and this one doesn’t measure up yet. Your mileage may vary. However, the iPhone was indispensable in our case for mapping our way to the general area for each geocache, and for looking up information about each specific geocache from geocaching.com while we were out and about.

We tried to use the iPhone to pinpoint the locations for geocaches. This didn’t work well at all. The iPhone doesn’t have real GPS, but simulates it from cell tower signals. In situations where you can get a good cell signal from a tower, but cannot reach multiple towers at the same time, this works poorly. If you are in a populated area, you can probably get a pretty good pinpoint on your location. However, in outlying areas, and especially out in the country away from metropolitan areas, this approach will be much more frustrating than useful.

However, after a couple of false starts, we found one geocache location that was perfect for us. The setting was beautiful. There was an obvious place to park the car. We had an easy, yet very interesting, walk to get to the geocache site. The geocache was very easy to find, yet most likely wouldn’t have been noticed at all by casual observers who might walk past it. The site itself was a fascinating place, being an old abandoned paved road that was mostly overgrown by fallen trees etc. It was a small abandoned section of the old highway 66 near Catoosa, Oklahoma, and it looks like that little stretch of perhaps 1/4 mile of road hasn’t been driven in over 50 years or more by my guess. The road itself dead-ends near a fallen down bridge that used to carry cars across the Verdigris river. It was a very natural and secluded setting, and the kids were wild with joy about being outside in an interesting place. They found colorful butterflies, intricate and interesting little mushrooms, and a small underground “cave” big enough to crawl into if you wouldn’t mind maybe meeting a bull snake. The geocache was “hidden” at the base of a small bluff 15 or 20 feet off the pavement, surrounded by flat stones to conceal it from casual eyes, but easily spotted by my oldest girl, since they were all looking for it. It was a small ammo box, a metal box perhaps a foot long and four inches or so wide, and maybe six inches high. Inside was a small notebook for log entries, a pen, and an assortment of other items. We took 3 or 4 items and left 6 or 7 items in return, trying to make sure the box was as interesting when we left it as when we found it. We were all pumped about our first successful, and extremely pleasant, geocaching experience.

I really had in mind to spend only a couple of hours doing this. But at this point my kids were raving lunatics, anxious to find another cache. We located a candidate. This time, it was beside a road, a dead-end road that was not busy, near an interesting farm gate that was painted red. We hunted around for it, but we didn’t know exactly what we were looking for, and not having much luck. About the time that I was ready to give up, my oldest daughter discovered it. It was a small coffee can, with the notebook log and a few small toys inside. The kids were really excited to find it, and trotted out their toys to trade.

We’d been at it for a few hours, and I asked the kids if they wanted to go home now. Nobody wanted to quit. The day was hot, and I idled the car a lot at some of the places we went, and I burned up a lot of that gasoline that costs as much these days as a mortgage payment on your house. We went to look for another cache that was hidden somewhere under a bridge for I-44. As the cars and trucks rumbled by overhead, my kids slogged through and around very messy mud and climbed 75 degree slopes of cement and crawled into extremely dirty places under the highway to try to find the cache. One kid lost a shoe to the mud. After I retrieved the shoe, I had her take her shoes and socks off. This probably wasn’t a good idea, because there was lots of broken glass about, but I didn’t know what else to do. We gave up before we found what was probably a medicine bottle with a pencil and paper in it to log the find. At this point, the kids were pretty hot and sweaty and fairly dirty. I drove 7 or 8 miles to a Wal-Mart to get a cheap pair of shoes for the girl who lost her shoe in the mud, because it was too dirty to put it back on.

Next, we went to Haikey Creek Park south of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The cache there was located in some dense underbrush, and we were unable to get closer than 200 feet from it. (I verified the distance a bit later with a real GPS.)

It was dark by now. I went to Academy Sports about 15 minutes before closing time, and bought a Garmin eTrex H GPS. This is a $100 unit intended for hikers and campers, and it looks like it will work fairly well for geocaching. (If you look for this used, make sure it is the “H” version. The earlier versions were not good enough for geocaching.) After using this unit’s clumsy interface to enter a waypoint (GPS terminology for punching in GPS coordinates of a specific location) for our last cache attempt in Haikey Creek Park, we went back to Haikey Creek to see how far we were from the cache. The iPhone would not give us a fix in that area at all. The eTrex worked fine there, and we could clearly see that the closest we ever got to the cache was about 200 feet away, through impenetrable brush. This adventure was carried out by driving into the parking lot and shining the bright lights from our headlights into the woods where we had walked earlier, and then walking out there without a flashlight to check out the GPS unit. This was about 9:15 PM. My two younger kids had to go out there with me, but didn’t realize how dark it was going to be. By the time we went back to the car, they were imagining run-ins with bears and wolves out in the woods in the dark. It was pretty funny, but they were laughing at themselves about it too. After we got back to the car, a police officer stopped and asked us if we needed any help. I am sure he wanted to make sure that we weren’t doing anything malicious in the park, being there after dark when everyone else was gone. I asked what the curfew was for the park. He said we were still over an hour early for it, so there was not a problem with us being there, but he just wanted to make sure we were ok. I was glad we made it back to the car before he stopped, because otherwise my fifteen year old daughter would have had to try to answer his questions by herself.

We went to Braums for a very late supper. The staff was young, and distracted, and it took them nearly half an hour to get our simple order together. By this time it was after 10:00, and my kids were barely able to eat without falling asleep. Nevertheless, since our earlier find that was near the red gate wasn’t far from our house, I punched in the GPS coordinates for it into the eTrex unit, and it took us back to within about 5 feet of the place where the small coffee can was hidden. I find that to be very satisfactory.

Once I got the kids home, I literally carried the two younger ones inside, got them undressed, and put the them into the bathtub and cleaned them up. They went to bed happy about a fun all-day outing with dad.

All of us considered it a successful, happy, and memorable day. As a result of this experience, I would highly recommend geocaching to any parents who want something interesting to do with their kids. Be safe, be careful, get a real GPS unit, and have a blast. You absolutely will learn new things, and find this to be a life-enriching experience.